And some excerpts from the Dr. William Davis interview: The Impact of Wheat on Heart Disease and Health. It’s incredible! Dr. Davis is a cardiologist and the author of Wheat Belly. His focus with his heart patients is: no grains, fish oil, gut flora, fixing low D and addressing low thyroid!

Sound familiar? All of these can also be part of a program for improving mood and ending anxiety

Here are some excerpts:

One of the earliest solutions was a very, very common abnormality in people with coronary disease – an excess of small oxidation prone LDL particles. So I used the data published by people like Ron Krauss in UC Berkeley and some others and took all the grains out of people’s diet. And lo and behold it works like a charm. That became a cornerstone of what I was doing for coronary disease.

People were starting to tell me that the rheumatoid arthritis was going away and that their glaucoma had gone away, and their leg edema, hypertension, acid reflux, irritable bowel syndrome, bowel urgency, funny skin rashes, rosacea, rosacea-eczema, seborrhea, belly fat. All of these conditions reversed with elimination of grains.

When I added vitamin D to the mix about eight, nine years ago, that’s when we saw dramatic reductions

Fish oil, of course. Not a huge effect, but it does help. I love it because it reduces the after meal, postprandial flood of lipoproteins. It has a big effect on subduing that effect. Heart disease, as you know, develops in the after-eating few hours, not so much while you’re fasting.

Thyroid normalization. I started paying attention to thyroid based on the Norwegian data suggests that a TSH of 1.4 or greater (in the presumed normal range) could as much as double or triple cardiovascular death. Lo and behold, it became a critical part of the management of coronary disease.

And then lastly, most recently this notion of cultivating bowel flora. So we use so-called prebiotic fibers or resistant starches to purposely cultivate healthy species of bowel flora. And I’ll be darned. This has proven to be a critical piece.

I’m sure my experience is similar to yours. I haven’t seen a heart attack in years. I used to see a couple of heart attacks a week when I was younger – just telling people to take the statin drug and cut their fat and exercise and eat everything in moderation and all that nonsense.

Wow! This is profound!

They go on to talk about how whole-wheat flour, white flour, and table sugar all have the same glycemic load and blood sugar response – which you know also plays a big part in anxiety.

And then one of my favorite sections is this discussion on opiates:

If you eat the gliadin protein of wheat…same protein, by the way, in rye and barley. It’s called secalin in rye, hordein in barley and zein in corn. Sometimes you partially digest the small peptides about 5 amino acids long. Those peptides have very unique sequences rich in proline that make it very resistant to human digestion. Those five amino acid pieces act like opiates on the human brain.

The effect of the opiates depend on your individual susceptibility. So if you’re a kid with ADHD or autistic spectrum disorder, it causes behavioral outbursts. If you are a paranoid schizophrenic, it causes paranoia and hearing voices. If you have bipolar illness, it triggers the mania, the high. [my addition: if you’re prone to anxiety and depression it can make your symptoms much worse and even be the main cause]

If you have a tendency towards binge eating disorder or bulimia, it causes 24-hour a day food obsession.

Now, in everyday people who don’t have any of those conditions, it only causes appetite stimulation, many many hundreds of calories more per day every day. It causes incessant hunger. You have to eat all the time.

One study (Lydiard 2001) found that 50 to 90 percent of people with IBS who visited a doctor for treatment also suffered from various anxiety disorders (panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder) and major depression.

I have all my clients who have any digestive issue (which is most of them), do the SIBO questionnaire and then talk to their doctor about doing the SIBO breath test/ hydrogen breath test or SIBO test. Genova offers this or you can ask your conventional doctor to order this.

SIBO Symptoms, Clues and Associated Conditions

The main symptoms of SIBO are those of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). SIBO has been shown to exist in up to 84% of IBS patients and is therefore theorized to be the underlying cause. It is associated with many other disorders as well, as an underlying cause or as an after effect of the pre-existing disease.

In particular, if the symptoms of IBS are present, or one of the associated diseases along with digestive symptoms is present, consider SIBO.

According to Bures et al, “It is mandatory to consider SIBO in all cases of complex non-specific dyspeptic complaints (bloating, abdominal discomfort, diarrhea, abdominal pain), in motility disorders, anatomical abnormalities of the small bowel and in all malassimilation syndromes (malabsorption, maldigestion).”

The above list of SIBO symptoms has been adapted from the site of Dr Allison Siebecker and used with permission here on the blog. Please check out Dr. Siebecker’s site siboinfo.com for a wealth of information about SIBO.

Dr. Steven Masley created The Healthy Heart Summit to address the great deal of misinformation that exists on lifestyle and heart disease – far too many myths are still believed.

Heart disease is the #1 cause of death for men and women. Yet, it is often addressed with stents and bypass surgeries that only treat the symptoms, not the causes. It’s time to dispel the myths and misinformation about the causes of heart disease, and learn how to give you and your family a long, healthy life together.

Here are some snippets from Dr. Masley’s interview with Jonny Bowden, known as The Nutritional Myth Buster, and author of The Great Cholesterol Myth

So from a pure weight loss point of view, it doesn’t matter if you eat your meat at McDonald’s or if you eat it from grass-fed Kobe beef from wherever. It probably is a wash in terms of weight loss, maybe not in terms of inflammation. But if you want the health benefits and the weight-loss benefits, then you’ve got to go to what we call smart fats, which are fats that actually support your metabolism, help balance your hormones, creates satiety, and do all the wonderful things that fats do without any of the bad things that what we call mean fat or unclean fat.

Smart fats would include the monounsaturated fats that we see so prevalent in the Mediterranean diet. And that would come from olive oil, macadamia nut oil, a couple of the other nut oils, oleic acid. That’s the monounsaturated fat. That’s a good fat.

Omega-3s, obviously, particularly the ones from fish oil, the DHA and EPA, the long-chain fatty acids have myriad of health benefits on the brain and on visual acuity and on attention and behavior and all kinds of depression (and anxiety). Those are smart fats.

All the recent studies have shown no harm from saturated fat. They’re neutral. For years, we’ve been villainizing them. And all the recent data would say that saturated fat from animal protein, from dairy, from these plant sources (like coconut), it’s harmless.

We now know that there are about 4 or 5 kinds of HDL and about 4 or 5 kinds of LDL. And they don’t all behave the same. And it’s not really 100 percent accurate to say that all HDL is good. Most of it is. But there’s a couple that may be a little inflammatory and some that are less good than others.

There’s a very big distinction between what’s known as LDL-A particles and LDL-B. Now, if you look at LDL-A particles under the microscope, they look like a big cotton ball. And they do just about as much damage. They’re just pretty innocuous. They’re not necessarily beneficial. But they don’t do any harm. It’s like a tennis ball thrown at you. It’s not going to do any harm. The others are like golf balls. And they’re very nasty inflamed oxidized particles. And they can cause damage. Now, the newer more modern tests (advanced lipid profile) looks at these particles.

Stress can cause a heart attack all by itself. We talk about voodoo death and Walter Cannon, the psychologist in the 20s who first discovered this phenomenon. You can die from fear. Your arteries are clear. But stress really can promote heart disease. It can even cause heart disease. So these are things that we don’t tend to look at nearly as much. And instead, we’re obsessively focused on this molecule of cholesterol, which is pretty harmless and very important for the brain and for the heart and for everything else in the body.

So yes, stress and anxiety play a big role in heart disease and this is the topic of my interview: Anxiety/Stress, Depression and Heart Disease

Tune in to hear Jonny Bowden, my anxiety interview and these speakers (and many more):

This blog covers the nutritional or functional testing I use with my clients, and what tests I’d run (and/or have my client’s doctor run) if everyone had unlimited funds.

Often it can be challenging to figure out the root cause/s of your anxiety, but that’s where questionnaires, nutritional/ functional/ testing, and a good practitioner (or team of practitioners like nutritionist, functional medicine doctor, nurse practitioner, therapist etc.) comes in – so you can put all the puzzle pieces together.

The following are what I have most of my clients do:

The basic blood work that I like to see is a lipid panel, a CBC (complete blood count), a metabolic panel, an iron panel that includes ferritin, and a thyroid panel that includes TSH, free T3, free T4, reverse T3, thyroid antibodies (antithyroglobulin and antithyroperoxidase), vitamin D, and CRP (C-Reactive Protein). There is much we can determine by looking at functional values: digestive status, possible gut dysbiosis, adrenal function, malabsorption, inflammation, as well as low iron, low vitamin D etc. I’ll share more about the markers on this panel of tests in a later blog post.

I also like to see an adrenal saliva test, which measures four times cortisol. So it’d be a saliva collection first thing in the morning, noontime, 5:00 PM, and 10:00 PM. It also shows DHEA; Secretory IgA; and an anti-gliadin antibody (a marker of gluten sensitivity)

I rely on the Pyroluria Questionnaire and response to the supplements. The pyroluria urine test is a possibility. But I seldom have clients do it, because we can often see a false negative.

For neurotransmitter imbalances – low serotonin, low GABA, low catecholamines and low endorphins – I rely on the Amino Acid Questionnaire and response to amino acids. Vitamin Diagnostics offer a platelet serotonin/dopamine/norepinephrine and epinephrine panel, which is the most accurate way to measure neurotransmitters, if you really wanted to measure them. I don’t ever recommend urinary neurotransmitter testing. It just doesn’t seem to correlate with symptoms.

B12 levels. To determine a B12 deficiency, you would want to measure B12, methylmalonic acid (or MMA), and homocysteine.

The 23andme genetic testing. This will measure MTHFR, COMT, MAOA, CBS, GAD and many more polymorphisms.

Here is other testing that may be helpful for certain individuals:

A sex hormone saliva test. This will measures progesterone, estriol, estrone, estradiol, and testosterone. I have a wonderful nurse practitioner that I work with, and, if need be, will refer people out to the nurse practitioner if we need support when it comes to bioidentical hormones.

A food intolerance test that measures IgG antibodies to 60+ foods. This shows a delayed reaction to the foods.

A fatty acid test. This will measure omega-3s (EPA and DHA), omega-6s and omega-9s. And it’ll also measure trans fats. Doing this test is really helpful if you have pyroluria or think that you may have pyroluria.

A VAP test. If you have concerns about high cholesterol and heart disease, this is going to measure particle size, fibrinogen, Lp(a) and other cardio markers (since looking at only high total cholesterol is not particularly useful).

The OAT/Organic Acid Test. Great Plains offers this and it has markers of digestion, yeast overgrowth, infections, B vitamin status and neurotransmitter function.

A hair mineral analysis. This is a great way to look for toxic metals and mineral status. You want to look at ratios, not just levels. This is a good marker for copper toxicity as well. Analytical Research Lab offers this test.

If you think your copper is too high, or you’ve got low zinc, you can measure copper or ceruloplasmin. This is in serum.